'Nova's Winning Approach: All Business Under Wright'

Below is a great article from Philly.com on how Jay Wright treated the Final Four as a business trip, keeping players away from all distractions, so that they could ensure maximum focus throughout the final days of the tournament.  You can read the article in full here.

When Jay Wright arrived in Detroit for his first Final Four as Villanova coach in 2009, he wanted his players, coaches and support staff to enjoy the experience. But when the Wildcats went out for their national semifinal game that weekend against North Carolina, he knew that plan had major flaws.

"It was about 10 minutes into the game and I knew," Wright recalled last week. "You could just see the focus in Carolina. You could see our guys were just playing a game. I knew I didn't get these guys ready.

"Obviously, [Tar Heels coach Roy Williams] had been there many times. They were ready. They were playing on a completely different level than we were. We were there to play a fun game in front of a big crowd. So that's when I knew."

So seven years later, when the Wildcats arrived in Houston last Wednesday for the 2016 Final Four, it was strictly a business trip. The key words were "focused" and "dialed in" and "attitude." His players were pretty much kept apart from their families. The entire team met together, ate together, hung together, thinking only "next game," one of the coach's favorite expressions.

Then late Monday night, while wading through about six inches of streamers and confetti that had fallen from the rafters of cavernous NRG Stadium celebrating the Wildcats' national championship, Wright, his players, everyone involved with his program and 'Nova Nation discovered that only winning made the Final Four an enjoyable experience.

The team that Wright built, nurtured, prodded, cajoled, hollered at, and eventually hugged rose to the top of the college basketball mountain against the same team that taught its coach a lesson in 2009.

The Wildcats kept their focus after giving up a 10-point lead on an incredible tying three-point shot by North Carolina's Marcus Paige and topped it with one of their own: Kris Jenkins' 24-foot three-pointer at the buzzer that gave the program its second national championship, 77-74, over the Tar Heels.

Wright kept his own steely focus - "coach mode," he called it - even as delirium reigned all around him. He thought the officials might put a few tenths of a second on the clock after the big shot.

"I'm the adult," he said. "I've got all these 18- to 22-year-olds around me. They're going to go crazy and I'm going to have to get them gathered and we're going to have to defend a play with .7 seconds [left]. That's what I was thinking."

He still seemed stunned while addressing reporters about 90 minutes later.

"You dream that this happens, you don't know what it's going to feel like, how you're going to handle it," he said. "It is really surreal. I don't have a plan for what to do. I was prepared if we lost how to keep these guys' heads up [but] I didn't have a plan for this because we always say, 'Hey, whatever happens, we'll deal with it, but let's concentrate on the game.'

"I think that's the best thing we did in the tournament. For three weeks, we really stayed focused on basketball. We felt guilty by keeping them sequestered. My wife [Patti] even apologized to their families [Sunday] night, and they actually told her, 'We're all in. We support it.' Then Patti came and told me that, which made me feel better."

Through the tournament's six games, the Wildcats competed at a level significantly higher than what took them to their third consecutive Big East regular-season championship. 

It all came down to the work in practice that Wright demands of the players.

"Coach puts us in the most difficult situations in practice every day," junior swing-man Josh Hart said. "So it's just that experience, that decision-making, being able to go in there and make the right play. The repetition that Coach puts us in really helps us learn."

That practice work directly led to a national championship. With 4.7 seconds left, Ryan Arcidiacono took an inbounds pass, dribbled into the frontcourt and flipped the ball to Jenkins for the game-winning basket.

"We work on that play every single day in practice," Arcidiacono said. "It's not about me taking the right shot. It's about me making the right read. I think I just did that."

"It's like a dream right now, doesn't even seem real," Wright said. "First thing I thought of: That was an incredible college final. I watch them all on TV. That's what I'm still thinking about, that I'm so lucky to be a part of it."

Or maybe Villanova is the lucky one to have Wright.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/colleges/villanova/20160406__Nova_s_winning_approach__All_business_under_Wright.html#TM7AfqebUGeYl7rV.99